The deaths of four U.S. diplomats in Libya and the protests that led to the occupation of the U.S. Embassy's grounds in Cairo boil down to a single word: Ignorance. In this country, we are ignorant of the kinds of actions we routinely undertake that can set off street-level outrage across the Muslim world. In the Muslim world, a kind of thin-skinned ignorance is what drives people to be whipped into mass hysteria and commit murder over something as simple as a baseless rumor or a single individual's expression in film.

It happened after 9/11, when the Arab world became consumed with a rumor that Israel had instigated the World Trade Center attacks because of a hysteria-whipping email campaign, by unknown instigators, alleging that 5,000 Jews had been forewarned not to go to work in lower Manhattan on that morning. It was shocking how many educated, well-read Arabs bought into that absurdity. When a Danish newspaper ran a cartoon deemed to defame the Prophet Muhammed, violent protests swept across the Muslim world, leading to more than 100 deaths. The Danish embassy in Pakistan was bombed, and anti-Danish and anti-European attacks swept across the Middle East.

Or consider the right-wing fanatic's attack on Sikhs in Wisconsin in early August, ignorantly believing they were Muslims and, therefore, responsible for everything al-Qaeda had committed in the name of Islam.

Today, the Arab world is reeling over a rumored film depiction on YouTube by an obscure Israeli Jew in California deemed to be mocking the Prophet Muhammed. At least, that's the most sense anyone can make of what sparked the controversy that led to the death, by rocket-propelled grenade, of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. State Department employees at the U.S. Consulate in Bengazi, Libya.

Ignorance is what causes people to lash out in anger at anyone and anything that represents the entity responsible for committing the slight that prompted the anger -- even if the government or broader community had absolutely nothing to do with the slight itself. Ignorance is what makes uninformed people listen to rabble-rousing preachers -- Christians in the U.S. and Muslims in the Middle East -- whose only goal is to incite religious hatred. And ignorance of the enormous religious sensitivities in our world is what drives certain individuals to organize Quran-burnings, to needlessly draw mocking cartoons or to produce films that set out to denigrate another faith's religious icon. These acts serve no purpose whatsoever. So why commit them? What greater good is served?

Everyone needs to calm down. It is exceedingly easy to play on people's worst fears and deepest religious values. It just takes a few thin-skinned individuals, acting on a perceived outrage, to create a mass uproar far out of proportion to the actual offense committed. Just because I disagree vocally with your religion and criticize it openly does not mean you have the right to kill me. Ever. If you allow someone else's words to threaten your religious faith, perhaps you need a gut check about what you believe in. If you're strong in your beliefs, nothing I say should shake you from those beliefs.

It'll be easy for certain politicos in the United States to capitalize on this new violence in Egypt and Libya. They'll accuse the Obama administration of mishandling the Arab Spring transitions from dictatorship to democracy. They'll say we should never have allowed this genie out of the bottle because it's clear that the fanatics have taken over. And it all happened on Obama's watch, therefore, he's responsible.

That's an argument designed to appeal to Americans' ignorance. But informed people should know better. These fanatical tendencies have been brewing for decades. The people instigating the current violence are part of a very small group of Salafi religious fanatics who are trying hard to gain a political foothold during the Arab Spring transitions. They have been repeatedly shouted down in both Egypt and Libya. Even the Islamists who hold elected political positions in those countries don't want anything to do with these fanatics.

The only course for the United States to take is to bolster the elected officials who are standing up to the fanatics. But U.S. officials must exercise extreme caution, because they don't want to say or do anything that would inadvertently be used by the fanatics to generate more support. Diplomats, quite simply, have to exercise diplomacy.

Back home, we can do a far better job of increasing public understanding of the sensitivities and urging people to exercise self-restraint. People just have to ask themselves: Is my freedom of speech and my desire to express opposition to another's religion so important that I'm willing to get a fellow American killed for it?

I don't advocate being soft on the murderers of the U.S. diplomats in Libya. But if we can minimize the pretexts they use to promote their twisted view of the world, then maybe lives will be saved.